I'll begin this blog with two questions:
"Miss, what's a skyscraper?" (1970)
"Miss, where's India?" (2010)
My forty years of teaching are bracketed by these two inquiries, posed in different places at different times, by two different students who earnestly wanted to know something. Both stepped out of their comfort zones to ask--risking peer ridicule in classrooms--and both were serious about finding the truth. That is the good news--four decades of turbulent school reform, yet people still want to learn and know. Students need more than the telling of an answer.
How do we learn about the world around us?
As an English teacher, I have seldom taught Shakespeare, even though I am a scholar of Elizabethan literature. More often than not, my literacy skills serve other fields. The first question about the skyscraper, for example, was asked by a fifth-grader in a rural New England one-room schoolhouse in 1970. I was there to assist in social studies enrichment. The topic was "cities." I blundered into this project by rattling on about stop lights, parking problems, traffic, and skyscrapers, none of which were familiar to my students. The development of the Internet may have begun in the 1960s, but my schoolhouse was a long way from that resource. Connections and metaphor-making were made from materials at hand.
A skyscraper is a tall building.
What do we mean by tall? We had to make do without a field trip to Boston or Quebec, so we began with where we were. First out of the box was the mountain analogy. We were perched on one, and most of the kids had been “down the hill” a time or two, so the “people-look-like-ants” idea was easily transmitted. Tall building? The forest was a good, but limited, stand-in since many New England towns were ruled by zoning ordinances that limited building height to less than the town’s church spire. People working above the clouds without their feet planted on or close to the ground was a puzzling idea. In addition, the state education department distributed a curriculum “enrichment” box for the unit on cities. Our support tools included a game of checkers and a box of dominoes. We stacked up the checkers, and we lined up the dominoes in city grids on the boards, explained scale models, but, after all, they were plastic, easily toppled mini-buildings, which undercut the idea of “tall.” The students wanted to get closer to the reality. I bought newspapers and architecture books of the mountain, we climbed some trees, made a pyramid, and drew pictures from television. We watched King Kong, to see the Empire State Building.
The students could fashion reasonable explanations of cities and skyscrapers when we were done. Still, it all led to another question: Why do they call it a skyscraper if it doesn’t? Ah. Now there was a Purple Haze moment, with apologies to Jimi Hendrix.
Tomorrow, I’ll write about the second question.
"Miss, what's a skyscraper?" (1970)
"Miss, where's India?" (2010)
My forty years of teaching are bracketed by these two inquiries, posed in different places at different times, by two different students who earnestly wanted to know something. Both stepped out of their comfort zones to ask--risking peer ridicule in classrooms--and both were serious about finding the truth. That is the good news--four decades of turbulent school reform, yet people still want to learn and know. Students need more than the telling of an answer.
How do we learn about the world around us?
As an English teacher, I have seldom taught Shakespeare, even though I am a scholar of Elizabethan literature. More often than not, my literacy skills serve other fields. The first question about the skyscraper, for example, was asked by a fifth-grader in a rural New England one-room schoolhouse in 1970. I was there to assist in social studies enrichment. The topic was "cities." I blundered into this project by rattling on about stop lights, parking problems, traffic, and skyscrapers, none of which were familiar to my students. The development of the Internet may have begun in the 1960s, but my schoolhouse was a long way from that resource. Connections and metaphor-making were made from materials at hand.
A skyscraper is a tall building.
What do we mean by tall? We had to make do without a field trip to Boston or Quebec, so we began with where we were. First out of the box was the mountain analogy. We were perched on one, and most of the kids had been “down the hill” a time or two, so the “people-look-like-ants” idea was easily transmitted. Tall building? The forest was a good, but limited, stand-in since many New England towns were ruled by zoning ordinances that limited building height to less than the town’s church spire. People working above the clouds without their feet planted on or close to the ground was a puzzling idea. In addition, the state education department distributed a curriculum “enrichment” box for the unit on cities. Our support tools included a game of checkers and a box of dominoes. We stacked up the checkers, and we lined up the dominoes in city grids on the boards, explained scale models, but, after all, they were plastic, easily toppled mini-buildings, which undercut the idea of “tall.” The students wanted to get closer to the reality. I bought newspapers and architecture books of the mountain, we climbed some trees, made a pyramid, and drew pictures from television. We watched King Kong, to see the Empire State Building.
The students could fashion reasonable explanations of cities and skyscrapers when we were done. Still, it all led to another question: Why do they call it a skyscraper if it doesn’t? Ah. Now there was a Purple Haze moment, with apologies to Jimi Hendrix.
Tomorrow, I’ll write about the second question.
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